|Don't waste your pity upon me,” wrote old Mr. Chetwynd to his son
Raine, an Oxford don. “This is not the Euxine, and even if it were,
there would be compensation.
I have fallen in love in my old age. She is a little brown-haired,
brown-eyed, fresh-coloured English girl, who has come lately to sit
by me at table. Owing to her, a change has come o'er the spirit of my
meals.
I say and do all kinds of foolish things. I caught myself yesterday
brushing my coat before coming down to dinner. I shall be wearing
a flower in my buttonhole before long. I am already supplied with
bouquets.
“My young lady's ignorance is fascinating; it forms a bond between us.
The Oxford young ladies, who will tell you of their charming talk with
the dear professor, little know what wicked satirical thoughts they have
left behind in the dear professor's breast. But this one actually does
not want to teach me anything. Think of it! She is Homeric. I told her
she reminded me of Nausicaa. Instead of taking the allusion as a text to
preach the newest theories of female education, she asked me sweetly who
Nausicaa was. It is wonderful! In brief, my dear Raine, if you value
the place you hold in your poor old daddy's heart, you must pay me your
promised visit with the utmost celerity.”
He was a striking figure in the pension, this old scholar, whose
heart Felicia had won. All the ladies knew that he was a professor,
wonderfully learned, and that he was writing a learned book, in which
pursuit he spent half his days among the musty manuscripts in the Geneva
University Library. In consequence, they looked upon him with a certain
awe. They saw very little of him, except at meals, and then only those
who were within easy conversational distance profited much by his
society. Now and then, on rare occasions, he came into the salon after
dinner, where he would take a hand at piquet with Mme. Popea, whose
conspicuously best behaviour on these occasions was a subject of
satirical pleasure to the others. But as a general rule he retired to
his own room and his private avocations.
As a matter of fact, he was an Oxford scholar of considerable repute,
honoured and welcomed in every Common Room. In his middle age he had
filled a professorial chair in a Scotch University, which after some
years he had resigned for reasons of climate and failing health.
At present he was engaged on critical work dealing with the Swiss
Reformers, and involving accurate documentary research. He had already
spent the latter part of the summer at Zürich, examining the Zwinglius
MSS., and now he was busy with the Calvinistic treasures of Geneva. How
long his task would last would depend upon his rate of progress. But as
he had let his small house in Oxford for a year, and as the quiet of the
Pension Boccard suited him, he had decided upon staying at Geneva for a
considerable time.
A strange anomaly, with his learning and industry, in the midst of the
heterogeneous feminine idleness of the Pension. In a vague way all
the women felt it. His appearance, too, was strikingly suggestive of a
personality inaccessible to the trivialities round which their own souls
centred. Once a strong, thick-set man, he retained at seventy-two, great
breadth of bent shoulders. His hair, scanty at the top and long, was
still black, as were his heavy eyebrows, beneath which gleamed lustrous
black eyes. The sombre depth of the latter and the deep furrowings on
his dark, square face gave it, in moments of repose, a stern expression
but when a smile or the play of fancy or interest lit it up, it was
like the sunshine breaking upon a granite scaur. The very magic of
the change had in it something eerie, incomprehensible. And a rare
tenderness could sometimes well from the heart into the eyes, making the
old face beautiful; but that was not displayed for the benefit of the
ladies of the Pension.
The fresh instincts of the young girl, however, divined the underlying
tenderness and brought it to the surface. It was a natural intimacy,
which cheered both lives. The old scholar's genial humour, delicate,
playful fancy, evoked in Felicia spontaneity of merry thought and
speech. The meals, which once had been such ordeals, when eaten under
the whirlwind of Mme. Boccard's half-intelligible platitudes, became
invested with a rare charm. Instead of sitting shy and silent, she
laughed and jested with the inconsequence of twenty. The change was so
marked, that one day, when a mock quarrel arose between the old man and
herself, over the exact halving of a pear, Mme. Popea elevated surprised
eyebrows, and nudged Frau Schultz her neighbour.
“_Voilà bien les femmes!_ a man--a mummy will suffice--but let it be
masculine!”
“And the men, they are all the same,” said Frau Schultz, in her thick
South German. “Give them a pretty face, and no matter how old, they are
on fire.”
Frau Schultz applied herself again seriously to her meal, whilst Madame
Popea repeated her own observation to Madame Boccard, who laughed, and
prophesied a wedding in the pension. But as all this was whispered, it
did not reach the ears of the parties concerned, at the other end of the
table.
Mrs. Stapleton listened amusedly to the light talk between Mr. Chetwynd
and Felicia, though with a certain surprise and wistfulness. Charming
and courteous as the old man was when the mood for conversation was on
him, she had never been able to open in him that light playful vein.
What Frau Schultz had expressed coarsely, Katherine, with a finer
nature, felt delicately. It was Felicia's fresh maidenhood that had
instinctively gladdened the old man--a possession she herself had lost
for ever, with which she could gladden no man's heart. She looked across
the table and smiled at her own thought. What did it matter, after all?
She had had the roses and lilies in her time, and they had not brought
her any great happiness. Her life had been lived. Still, a woman
of thirty mourns her lost youth--all the more if it has been a
failure--just as an older woman mourns the death of a scrapegrace son.
And though Katherine smiled at herself, she wished for some of it back,
even to charm such an old, old man as Mr. Chetwynd. There will ever be
much that is feminine in woman.
“You haye made a conquest,” she said soon afterwards to Felicia.
“Haven't I?” laughed the girl. “He is so sweet. Do you know, I think
sweet people, when they grow very, very old, become quite young again.”
“Or, in this case, more accurately, isn't it that extremes touch?”
“Do you think I am so very young?” asked Felicia, seizing the objective.
“I am twenty.”
“Happy girl,” said Katherine, smiling. “But what I meant was, that if
you were thirty and he was fifty, you probably would have fewer points
of contact.”
“Or, if I were ten and he were eighty, we would play together like
kittens,” said Felicia, with girlish irreverence. “Well, it doesn't
matter. He is the dearest old man in the world, and it was very nice of
you to arrange for me to sit next to him.”
“It seems to have brightened you, Felicia.”
“Oh, yes, wonderfully. I was getting so bored and dull and miserable. It
is not very gay now, but I have something to look forward to every day.
And your letting me talk to you has made a great difference.”
“I am afraid I am not very entertaining,” said Katherine.
“Sometimes you are so sad,” said Felicia, sympathetically. “I wish I
could help you.”
“I am afraid you would have to upheave the universe, my dear.”
Felicia looked at her with such wonderful gravity in her brown eyes that
Katherine broke into a laugh.
“Well, you can do it gradually. Begin with my work-basket, will you? and
find me a spool of No. 100 thread.”
Without overstepping the bounds of kindly friendship, they saw much of
each other. An imperceptible shadow of reserve in Katherine's manner,
a certain variability of mood, a vein of hardness in her nature ever
liable to be exposed by a chance thought, checked in the young girl the
impulses of a more generous affection. Katherine was conscious of this;
conscious, too, of no efforts to win more from the girl. Now and then
she sounded a note of explanation.
Once they were talking of the pension's dreariness--an endless topic. It
happened that Felicia was disposed to take a cheerful view.
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” she said.
“By way of heightening its blackness, my dear,” said Katherine.
“Besides, the lining is turned to heaven and the blackness to earth, so
it does not help us much.”
“Oh, why are you so bitter?”
“Bitter?” echoed Katherine, musingly. “Oh, no! I am not, really. But
perhaps it were better that you should think so.”
But for all her refusal to admit Felicia any deeper into her heart,
Katherine welcomed her companionship frankly. She had looked forward
almost shudderingly to the dreary isolation of the winter. Whom could
she choose as a companion, to exchange a thought with beyond those of
ordinary civility? By a process of elimination she had arrived at
little Miss Bunter, with her canaries, her _Family Herald_ and _Modern
Society_, her mild spinsterish chit-chat. It was a depressing prospect;
but Felicia had saved her. Her society relieved the monotony of those
terrible dreary, idle days, took her out of herself, stilled for a few
odd hours the yearnings for a bright full life--yearnings all the more
inwardly gnawing by reason of the ever exerted strain to check their
outward expression.
She was standing before her glass one morning brushing her hair. She had
shaken it back loose; it was fair, long, and thick, and she had taken
up the brush languidly. She was not feeling well. Frau Schultz had
unsuccessfully tried to provoke a quarrel the night before; a little
graceful experiment in philanthropy that had engaged her attention of
late had ignominiously failed; the rain was pouring in torrents outside;
the day contained no hope; a crushing sense of the futility of things
came over her like a pall. She had roused herself, given her hair a
determined shake, and commenced to brush vigorously, looking at herself
sideways in the glass. But a weak pity for the weary, delicate face she
saw there filled her eyes with tears. Her arm seemed heavy and tired.
She dropped the brush and sank down on a chair, and spreading her arms
on the toilet-table, buried her face in them.
“Oh I can't, I can't!” she cried, with a kind of moan. “What is the
good? Why should I get up day after day and go through this weariness?
Oh, my God! What a life! Some day it will drive me mad! I wish I were
dead.”
The sobs came and shook her shoulders, hidden by the spreading mass of
hair. She could not help the pity for herself.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door. She sprang to her feet,
glanced hurriedly at the glass, and touched her face quickly with the
powder-puff. In a moment she had recovered.
Felicia entered in response to her acknowledgment of the knock. She had
been out in the rain; her cheeks were glowing above the turned-up collar
of her jacket.
“Oh, you are only just dressing. I have been up and about for ages. See,
I have brought you some flowers. Where shall I put them?”
Katherine felt gladdened by the little act of kindness. She thanked
Felicia, and went about the room collecting a few vases.
“Arrange them for me, dear, whilst I finish my hair.”
She returned to the looking-glass, and Felicia remained by the table
busy with the flowers.
“I went as far as the library with Mr. Chetwynd,” said Felicia. “I told
him he ought not to go out to-day, but he would go. When 'Raine,' as
he calls him, comes, I shall have to talk to him seriously about his
father.”
“The son has definitely settled to come, then?” asked Katherine, with a
hair-pin between her lips.
“Oh, yes. Mr. Chetwynd can talk of nothing else. He will be here quite
soon.”
“It will be a good thing,” said Katherine.
“Yes; it will do the dear old man good.”
Ordinarily Katherine would have smiled at the ingenuousness of the
reply; but this morning her nerves were unstrung.
“I wasn't thinking of him. I was thinking of ourselves--us women.”
“I wonder what he'll be like,” said Felicia.
“What does it matter? He will be a man.”
“Oh, it does matter. If he is not nice--”
“My dear child,” said Katherine, wheeling round, “it does not signify
whether he has the face of an ogre and the manners of a bear. He will be
a man; and it is a man that we want among us!”
The girl shrank away. To look upon mankind as necessary elements in life
had never before occurred to her. She would have been quite as excited
if a nice girl had been expected at the pension.
“But surely--” she stammered.
Katherine divined her thought; but she was too much under the power of
her mood to laugh it away.
“No!” she cried, with a scorn that she felt to be unjust--and that very
consciousness made her accent more passionate.
“We don't want a man to come so that one of us can marry him by force!
God forbid! Most of us have had enough of marrying and giving in
marriage. Heaven help me, I am not as bad as that yet, to throw myself
into the arms of the first man who came, so that he could carry me away
from this Aceldama. But we want a man here to make us feel ashamed of
the meannesses and pettinesses that we women display before each other,
and to make us hide them, and appear before each other as creatures to
respect. Women are the lesser race; we cannot exist by ourselves; we
become flaccid and backboneless and small--oh, so small and feeble!
I get to despise my sex, to think there is nothing, nothing in us;
no reserve of strength, nothing but a mass of nerves and soft, flabby
flesh. Oh, my dear child, you don't know it yet--let us hope you never
will know it--this craving for a man, the self-contempt of it, to crave
for nothing more but just to touch the hem of his garment to work the
miracle of restoring you to the dignity of your womanhood. Ah!”
She waved her arms in a passionate gesture and walked about the room
with clenched hands. Felicia arranged the flowers mechanically. These
things were new to her philosophy. She felt troubled by them, but she
kept silent. Katherine continued her parable, the pent-up disgusts and
wearinesses of months finding vehement expression.
“Yes, a man, a man. It is good that he is coming. A being without
jangling nerves, and with a fresh, broad mind that only sees things in
bulk and does not dissect the infinitely little. He will come here like
a sea breeze. It is a physical need among us, a man's presence now
and then, with his heavy frame and deep voice and resonant laugh, his
strength, his rough ways, his heavy tread, his great hands. Ah! you are
young; you think I am telling you dreadful things; you may never know
it. It is only women who live alone that can know what it is to yearn
to have a man's strong arm, brother or father or husband, to close round
you as you cry your poor weak woman's heart out, and the more humble,
self-abasing longing, just to long for a man's voice. What does it
matter what the man is like?”
There was a few moments' silence. Katherine went on with her dressing.
The words had relieved her heart, yet she felt ashamed at having spoken
so bitterly before the young girl. _Maxime debetur_--. She thought of
the maxim and bit her lip. But was she not young too? Were they so far
apart in age that they could not meet on common grounds? She looked
in the glass. Her charm had not yet gone. Yet she wished she had not
spoken.
Felicia finished arranging the flowers, and disposed the four little
vases about the room. Then she went up to Katherine and put her arm
round her waist.
“I am sorry.”
It was all the girl could say, but it made Katherine turn and kiss her
cheek.
“I expect Mr. Chetwynd is going to be very nice if he is anything like
his father,” she said in her natural tones. “Forgive me for having been
disagreeable. I woke up like it. Sometimes this pension gets on one's
nerves.”
“It is frightfully dull,” assented Felicia. “But you are the busiest of
anybody. You are always working or reading or going out to nurse poor
sick people. I wish I did anything half as useful.”
“Well, you have made me more cheerful than I was, if that is anything,”
replied Katherine.
A little later the old man announced to her the speedy arrival of his
son Raine. Katherine listened, made a few polite inquiries, learned the
functions of a college tutor, and the difference between a lecturer and
a professor.
“He is a great big fellow,” said the old man. “He would make about ten
of me. So don't expect to see a thin, doubled up, elderly young man in
spectacles!”
“Is your son married?” asked Frâulein Klinkhardt, who sat next to
Felicia.
She was a fair, florid woman of over thirty, with strongly hewn features
and a predisposition for bold effects of attire. The old man, who did not
like her, said that her hats were immoral. A glint of gold on one of
her front teeth gave a peculiar effect, in the way of suggestion, to her
speech.
“He has never told me,” said the old man, with his most courtly smile.
“You will see, she will try to marry him when he comes,” whispered Frau
Schultz to Mme. Boccard.
But Frâulein Klinkhardt laughed at the old man's reply.
“That is a pity, for married men--whom one knows to be married--are
always more agreeable.”
“And women, too,” said Mme. Popea with a little grimace of satisfaction.
“A bachelor is generally more chivalrous,” said Miss Bunter, who always
took things seriously. “He acts more in accordance with his ideals of
women.”
“Is Saul also among the prophets?” asked Katherine with a smile, “Miss
Bunter among the cynics?”
“Oh, dear! I hope not,” replied Miss Bunter in alarm; “I did not mean
that, but a bachelor always seems more romantic. What do you think, Miss
Graves?”
“I don't know,” said Felicia, laughing; “I like all men when they are
nice, and it doesn't seem to make any difference whether they are
married or not. Perhaps it may with very young men,” she added
reflectively. “But then very young men are different. For instance, all
the young subs in my uncle's regiment; it would seem as ridiculous to
call them bachelors as to call me a spinster.”
“But you are a spinster, Miss Graves,” said Miss Bunter, mildly
platitudinous.
“Oh, please!--” laughed Felicia. “A spinster is--” she paused in some
confusion, “An old maid,” she was going to add, but she remembered it
might be a tender point with Miss Bunter. Frau Schultz, however, struck
in with her harsh voice,--
“At what age does a woman begin to be a spinster, Miss Graves?”
Frau Schultz's perverted sense of tact was of the quality of genius. Old
Mr. Chetwynd came to the rescue of the maiden ladies.
“In England, when their first banns of marriage are published,” he said.
Mme. Boccard turned to Mme. Popea to have the reply translated into
French. Then she explained it volubly to the table.
The question at issue, the relative merits of bachelors and married men,
was never beaten out; for at this juncture, the meal being over, old Mr.
Chetwynd rose, turned, and hobbled out of the room, taking Felicia with
him.
An hour later Katherine was picking her way through the mud up the long
unsightly street in the old part of the town that leads to the Hotel de
Ville. At the ill-kept gateway of a great decayed house, she stopped,
and entering, descended the steps at a side doorway beneath to a room
on the basement, whose lunette window was on a level with the roadway. A
very old woman opened the door to her knock, and welcomed her with an--
“_Ah, Madame! C'est encore vous!_” and led her in with many expressions
of delight.
It was a poor, squalid enough room, very dark, ill-kept, littered with
cooking utensils, cookery, and strange articles of clothing. An old man
lay in the great wooden bedstead, his face barely visible in the dim
light which was further obscured by the dingy white curtains running on
a rope, fixed over the bed.
“Jean-Marie.” cried the old woman, “here is Madame come to read to you.
Will Madame give herself the trouble to sit down? My daughter has not
come in yet, so the room is still unmade.”
The old man raised himself on his elbow and grinned at Katherine.
“One would say it was an angel when Madame comes.”
The old woman broke out again in welcome. It was so good of Madame to
come. Jean-Marie could do nothing but talk of her. Really Jean-Marie was
right, and she was an angel.
Katherine took the venerable wooden armchair that was placed for her
near the stove, accepted graciously the pillow that the old woman took
from the bed to make her more comfortable, and after a few minutes'
gossip opened the book she had brought with her and began to read. The
old man turned so that he could fix his eyes upon her. His old wife sat
on a straight-backed chair at the foot of the bed and listened in deep
attention. Katherine read on amid a rapt silence, only broken now and
then by an “oh, la! la!” muttered under the breath, at which she
could scarcely repress a smile. She was happier now. Her best, kindest,
tenderest self only was shown to this poor, broken-down old couple who
seemed to worship her.
There was a humour blended with pathos, too, in the situation
that appealed to her. For the book in which their whole souls were
concentrated was a French translation of “Robinson Crusoe.”